Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Paterson for that question, and the answer is: I certainly can. While this government has been focused on protecting Australians and enabling Australians to live safely in the age of COVID, Defence has, yet again, been playing its part. It's not only our men and women in uniform across the three services; it's also personnel from right across the Department of Defence who have been assisting in the whole-of-government response right across the nation.

Defence has been responding in four key ways. We established, in March, a COVID-19 task force. The four areas of main response are: firstly, assisting states and territories with their health responses; secondly, assisting with the economic stimulus activities, particularly with our engagement with defence industry; thirdly, ensuring that our men and women overseas, 1,000 of them, are safe and well, and also dealing with all of the other issues of national security; and, fourthly, we have been providing additional support to our near neighbours, because, clearly, the threat of COVID-19 in many of our smaller Pacific nations, in particular, has the potential to be quite catastrophic. Today we have over 2,000 ADF personnel on the ground doing tasks ranging from contact tracing, quarantine compliance and, importantly, protecting our Indigenous communities.

I have just a few examples. For over a month, a small team of highly qualified ADF engineering maintenance specialists helped a surgical face-mask company in Shepparton boost the output exponentially of life-saving facial masks until sufficient civilians were able to be trained to now run that facility. More recently, as part of an AUSMAT-led Commonwealth team, the ADF deployed 50 personnel to the North West Regional Hospital in Burnie, for two weeks, to allow the staff to go into isolation and provide much-needed medical support to over 400 residents of north-west Tasmania.